Ahead of the new series of Likely Stories, Sky Arts have issued an interview with writer Neil Gaiman...Likely Stories, a new four-part adaptation for Sky Arts produced by Sid Gentle Films Ltd., is a collection of extraordinary short stories from the pen of Neil Gaiman. The series is directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, the duo responsible for the multi award winning critically acclaimed Nick Cave film 20,000 Days on Earth. Directors Iain and Jane attracted iconic Pulp frontman and solo artist Jarvis Cocker to create the score for the four stories, bringing his unique sound to the series. Starring Tom Hughes (The Game), George MacKay (Pride), Johnny Vegas (Moone Boy), Kenneth Cranham (Maleficent) and Rita Tushingham (Doctor Zhivago) with an ensemble cast including Monica Dolan (W1A), Paul Ritter (No Offence), Simon Manyonda (Doctor Who), Johann Myers (Good Cop) and Montserrat Lombard (Ashes to Ashes) playing across all four of the films.

Neil Gaiman said: “Short stories traditionally do not get a lot of love from television. I'm really excited to see what the team are going to do and make with Likely Stories -they've given it real thought and it feels like it's going to be something very, very special.”

Set in London, these four 30-minute short stories will be characteristically dark and strange whilst also drawing on the deftly crafted characters’ human warmth and wit. Centring on the act of storytelling, viewers will be drawn into Neil’s intricately crafted world that moves seamlessly between reality and fantasy. Neil himself will appear in each film in an unusual way, with subtle nods to his wider work that Gaiman super-fans will be able to spot.

Neil Gaiman gave an interview to Sky Arts about the new series:

"How would you describe the
four stories that make up
the series?

They have an oddness to them in that,
in a peculiar kind of way, they’re all likely
stories. Often my stories go off, they
can travel a long way from home. And
each of these stories, in their own way,
is small and close to home. Each of them
began with something small and odd and
prosaic – I thought, I wonder if I could
tell that as a story? Wouldn’t that be
interesting? There is definitely a theme of
consumption. People being consumed by
things; becoming other things; resisting
or embracing a fate that is going in some
way to change them. The nature of that
consumption fascinates me. In Feeders
& Eaters, the consumption is very literal.
Foreign Parts is based on the idea of
somebody essentially being consumed by
themselves. In Closing Time, there’s the
theme, I think, that the past, a dangerous
place filled with secrets that haven’t gone
away, can consume you. In Looking for the
Girl, you have somebody being consumed
by an image of somebody who isn’t there.
The idea of somebody feeling their life
being marked out in beats and everything
ageing but one thing. They definitely feel
like a weird little set.

Do the stories inhabit the
same world?

That’s a tricky question. I think all of my
stories happen in different places, but they
share a car park. They all join up out the
back. You can definitely get to one from
the other.

What made you want to become a
storyteller? What do stories
mean to you?

I don’t ever remember a time when I wasn’t
driven by stories; when they weren’t the
most interesting and exciting things there
were. We, as human beings, are designed to
find stories, to listen to them, to remember
them and then to repeat them. We use
stories to explain the world and because
they satisfy us on a deep level, because
they are the lies that we need to make
sense of our world. There’s also a joy in
all stories. Whether it’s in film or radio,
whether somebody tells you, whether you
read it… you experience emotions, you do
things that you wouldn’t otherwise do,
you look out through eyes you normally
wouldn’t look out through, you even die.
And then you look up and are unhurt, you
close the page and walk away. And that’s
fabulous, that’s power. Never think that
just because something didn’t happen it
doesn’t matter. And never think that just
because it’s not true, it didn’t change you.
Stories change us.

What’s your approach
to storytelling?

The biggest difference between writing and
telling a story is that when you are writing
a story you are doing it in a quiet place and
nobody cares. Even if you’re doing it in a
Starbucks, nobody cares. You can write the
funniest thing in the world, nobody’s gonna
laugh. You can write the scariest thing
in the world, nobody’s gonna shiver. You
can write the saddest thing in the world,
nobody’s gonna cry. Whereas the action of
storytelling is something that immediately
presumes an audience, and presumes an
audience who care and are interested and
are fascinated. And you want to grab them
and pull them in and say, listen I have this
thing I want to tell you. You’re saying come
with me. I’m trustworthy. Hold my hand.
We will walk together, you and I, into dark
places and it’s gonna be OK, because I’m
holding your hand. And they look at you
and they trust you and they listen to you.
And you take them by the hand and you
walk into dark places with them, then you
let go of their hand and you run away.
That’s storytelling.

Where do your ideas come from?

It’s two things coming together. Something
that you know, something that you’ve
thought or seen a hundred times, and
then something that could be. Suddenly
you have something that’s the beginning
of a story, you have something that’s the
beginning of an idea and you watch it
grow and you watch it twine, interconnect
and build.

What’s your attitude to
short stories?

I love short stories and have done since I
was a kid. It frustrates and fascinates me
that the short story is less popular, less
read and less loved than the novel. I wish it
was the other way around, because there’s
something magic about a story that can
take you all the way across the universe
and bring you back by teatime. I also like
the idea of compression, the fact that
every word in a short story should be doing
something. It should be creating character;
it should be moving the plot along.
It should be creating atmosphere.

You’ve never been frightened
of dealing with the darker
aspects of humanity. Is it
important to venture into
those areas?

You don’t need parameters to the
imagination. The idea of how far is too far is
something that you normally find by going
beyond. I would so much rather go out
there and say the things I shouldn’t say,
think the things I shouldn’t think, than
stop before. I think we make progress by
going too far. As writers, we sometimes
make progress by shocking ourselves.
I’ve written scenes that made me feel sick.
I’ve written scenes that astonished me.
I’ve written scenes that I didn’t know I was
going survive. But I knew they had to be
there and I knew those tales had to be told.
And when people say, well did you write
that to shock? No, you don’t write that to
shock. You write that because that’s where
the story goes.

Although there’s also usually
a blackly comic edge as well?

Life is fascinating. It doesn’t follow any
kind of genre rules, it is an absolute mess.
You can get slapstick, you can get tragedy,
you can get comedy. You will probably
get pornography. You will get scatological
material that you could not actually show.
All of this stuff is what it means to be
human. We cross genre all the time. We
push boundaries all the time and we don’t
think about that. You don’t think about the
fact that you can go from tender romance
to tragedy. And then you don’t have to stay
in tragedy, because strange high comedy
can happen with a friend’s body in the next
room, after they’ve passed away. Life has
no respect for genre boundaries.

There’s also a fairy-tale
quality to these stories. Do
you enjoy blurring the lines
of normal, everyday reality?

I’ve always liked kids’ fiction, where things
are beyond reality. That always seemed far
more interesting than the idea that reality
was what you got."

Here's some more information on each of the episodes:

Foreign Parts

There’s a sense that time is running out.
Our narrator, Simon, is like a man sinking in quicksand.
He’s a man of routine. Rising, dressing, travelling to work on
the DLR. Every day is the same. His sense of self is slipping
away as he becomes (perhaps literally) someone else.
It’s a similar story for Dr Benham, stuck in his STD clinic
watching a parade of patients come and go. In his parallel
story of metamorphosis he’s being spat out by his own life.
He too is becoming a different person, from the feet up.

NEIL SAYS
“When I wrote it this story was unsellable.
The men’s magazines didn’t like it because
it wasn’t exactly sex positive and the sci-fi
magazines didn’t like it because there was all
this weird sex in it. Then AIDS began cutting
this huge and terrifying swathe through the
world and I was losing friends. I had to take it
out of circulation until things settled down.”

Feeders and Eaters

We’re caught in the nocturnal world of the all-night cafe.
Joyce, a very pregnant young waitress, is our way in. A man
from her past, Eddie Barrow, appears as if from nowhere
with a pressing urgency to tell his story. Joyce wants us to
hear it.
Eddie tells us a love story – a strange, Gothic, warped
and weird love story. He tells us about Effie, the old lady
who lives in a room opposite his in a boarding house.
Effie is a remarkable, magical woman. However, she needs
raw meat to survive.

NEIL SAYS
“There are very few things over the years that
I’ve actually taken from dreams, but every now
and again you will find a treasure. Feeders &
Eaters mostly for me was a dream. I remember
waking up with the beats of the story in my
head, knowing what it felt like and thinking
I have to tell that story.”

Closing Time

Our narrator is a raconteur, a writer and
late-night barfly engaging in the tradition of weaving
club stories for his fellow drinkers. Feeling the warmth of
company and loosened by drink, he expertly draws people
in as he spins his tale.
He’s also suppressing a painful memory. Guilt-ridden
thoughts have haunted him since childhood and they
manifest themselves as a ghost story, his past consumed
by the human instinct to mythologise memories when they
hurt too much.

NEIL SAYS
“I started thinking about the 1980s in London
and the fact that for a very small period of
time I had wound up belonging to a now defunct
late-night drinking den. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t
it be fun to do a club story but at the same
time subvert all of the tropes of a club
story?’ I had much too much fun writing it.”

Looking for the Girl

Dean Smith is an ageing photographer. He’s almost 70, but
there’s still a glint in his eye. TV’s ‘face of culture’, Miranda
Walker, is interviewing him for television and asks about
his muse. Once the cameras are off the question unlocks a
story about Charlotte, aged 19, a Penthouse model.
As old magazines and photographs are pulled from
shelves it emerges that he’s a man consumed by an
untouchable fantasy. A two-dimensional image sparked
a moment of sexual awakening that he’s spent a lifetime
trying to recapture.

NEIL SAYS “I remember asking one of the Penthouse girls if she felt exploited. She said it was better than working the night shift in a biscuit factory and that, for her, the people being exploited were the men buying those magazines. I thought there was something weird and odd and beautiful about that. A sort of emptiness, the idea of people becoming pictures.”